Dr. Krishna Chakrabarty (in memorium)

Introduction

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Krishna Chakrabarty on Thursday, March 12, 2026. A bright flame was extinguished today and the world seems a little darker. The funeral service will be on Saturday, March 21, 2026, at 11:00 AM at the McCauley-Sullivan Funeral home, 530 W. Boughton Rd, Bolingbrook, IL 60440. The public is welcome. Krishna is survived by her daughter Kaberi, sister Swapna, and nephews Rana, Raja, and Debu. She was predeceased by her son Asit, husband Ananda, brother Chiranjit, and her parents, Naresh and Sulata Chakraverty.

Krishna was actively involved in supporting and participating in all events of the BAGC community. Universally recognized, she was the beloved “Krishna di” of all the Bengalis in the Chicago area. She was an active contributor to “Unmesh”, our Bengali magazine, and was a cofounder of the charity “Varosha”, for which she left a generous legacy. She was also one of the early supporters of Banga Bhaban and performed the bhit puja at its inception.

Krishna had also been a brilliant scholar. She was born in Pune in a family which emphasized education. At the age of twelve she was sent to New Era, a residential school in Bombay, because the small city in Gujarat where they lived at that time did not offer her enough challenge. The next year at the age of thirteen she passed matriculation coming in first among the women in the Bombay Presidency, which at that time included the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka. After doing her ISc at the Bombay St. Xaviers, she moved to Kolkata to be with her family and attended Scottish Church College and the Science College to do her BSc in Chemistry and MSc in Biochemistry, respectively. Next, at the age of twenty she came to California where she won a scholarship to do her PhD at the University of California, Davis. After finishing it with flying colors with a GPA of A, she came back to Kolkata at the age of twenty four with the expressed intention of continuing her career in India rather than in the USA. However, destiny had other plans for her. Three months after landing in India she got married to Ananda Chakrabarty, a marriage arranged by her professor, Dr. Sailesh Roy, even though she had already known Ananda, who was her classmate in MSc. As Ananda was all set to go to the United States for his Post Doc., Krishna ended up going back to the United States only six months after she left it. She has been here ever since. They both did post-doctoral studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana campus. However, Krishna chose to be a homemaker afterwards when Ananda started working as a scientist for GE in Albany, NY. While Ananda’s brilliant scientific career thrived, Krishna always chose to put her own career in the background, taking care of her two children.

In 1979, when her husband came to Chicago as a professor at the UIC Medical School, Krishna also finally joined the faculty there teaching biochemistry. She won the Best Teacher award there and was beloved by all her students. In 1998 she took early retirement so she could spend more time with her aging parents in India. However, they both passed away just months after that. Missing her students, Krishna began to volunteer for teaching small classes. She was put in charge of the Tutorial Department and was also serving on the admission board and continued teaching voluntarily for nearly thirty years until a few months before she passed away. With her trademark saree, bindi, and a thousand lumen smile, she was a familiar figure on the campus. She taught with compassion and love. Students flocked to her classes because it was rumored that anyone who could get into her tutorial class was guaranteed a medical degree after four years. Her compassion and dedication brought her more teaching awards. Students continued to write “thank you” letters to her long after they graduated.

Krishna loved every human being, and they loved her back. She respected everyone and never had anything bad to say about anyone. She loved to interact with everyone. She had inherited the linguistic genes of her mother and passed them on to her daughter. She was extremely independent and had travelled all over the world, sometimes by herself. She could speak four Indian languages fluently and several foreign languages tolerably well, so communicating with people was easy for her. She had moved to a retirement community in Elmhurst with her husband for the past six years and the 200 plus residents and workers there had all become her “friends”. She threw parties for all of them in
batches, for which she cooked herself in addition to ordering food, the last one taking place only two weeks before she was hospitalized. She spent the last few weeks of her life under hospice care but her positive attitude never left her. She enjoyed being visited by her friends, both from the Indian community and outside of it, and they continued to visit her in droves.

Now that she is finally released from her worldly sufferings, we pray for her soul. May the love and good wishes of her friends light up her way in her journey onwards to eternal peace.

Obituary provided by her family.